In recent times, the term “college and career ready” has come back into trend. It’s a term that first saw a spotlight during the Obama administration, when then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and company wanted to integrate the Common Core State Standards into our schools. While there were a plethora of controversies during the era and certainly some flubs, many of them documented here, one of the lasting impressions the administration left was the framing of K-12 education as a funnel for the workforce. Historically, it’s true that many business leaders and policymakers thought it best to insert their own visions for an educated labor pool, but this became more poignant as our latest current of education reform elevated skills and international competition as a mode of structural urgency.
But, taken from a societal lens, it’s nonsense.
“College and career readiness” assumes too much. It raises the expectations on students, schools, and communities to do the heavy lifting while lowering the expectations on governments and societies to provide pathways toward these ostensibly solid goals. For instance, why is college a goal when generations of Americans continue to accumulate burdensome student debt they can’t pay off for another generation? How many people’s college experiences prepared them for the current job they’ve attained? How many people continue to get college degrees above a bachelor’s degree for a job that only necessitates an associate’s degree? How many rich students continue to do well regardless of their performance in school?
Also, how well does matriculation into college reify our informal/formal social caste systems?
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